Italy’s Damaged, Vehicle-infested Versailles

CASERTA – The first things you notice at the Reggia in Caserta are the signs for the car park, which appear to have been specially designed to put tourists off. They’re all wrong, taking you round in a circle and leaving you in a bad mood for your visit. In fact, they seem to put a lot of people off, judging by the figures which show that the Reggia has lost more than 50,000 visitors a year for the past twelve years. If you can find your way out of the car park, with its non-functioning escalators, you will soon see why.

Welcome to Luigi Vanvitelli’s masterpiece, appointed a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1997. Since then, the residence built by the Bourbons at the heart of the Kingdom of Naples has been doing all it can to shed its prestigious image. Have you ever been to the Reggia? Have you ever walked down the avenue through the stunning park, past the various fountains, to the mythology-inspired marvel that is the fountain of Diana and Actaeon?

Last Thursday, you would have seen young lads diving among the celebrated statues, just as if they were at the beach. You would have seen them climbing onto the Torrione, the final section of the aqueduct, with no one to stop them. But there again, it has never occurred to anyone that it is time to ban the cars that scurry up and down the avenue beside the bicycles and the carriages. And they can’t all belong to Reggia staff because that would make it one of the most closely supervised sites in the world.

But there isn’t much supervision at the Reggia, despite the host of army and Carabinieri offices that occupy much of the palace. Or rather there’s none at all. As you can see from the unlicensed traders who swarm over the avenue, hang around the courtyards and infest the apartments, proffering pirated guidebooks, dodgy divining cards, umbrellas, balloons and suggestions for restaurants or even lottery numbers. The traders are part of the furnishings, as indeed are the aluminium barriers. On 5 October last year, a capital from the cornice plunged to earth, thankfully without hitting any tourists. It had been preceded a week earlier by a plummeting gable. Since then, aluminium barriers have mounted guard on the façade and on all four of the internal courtyards.

Scaffolding for repairs went up recently, in other words almost seven months after the event, but so far it has only raised the question of whether the thieves who stole the copper from the Faraday cage – the Reggia’s lightning conductor – used it as support to clamber up onto the roof. That’s right. The Faraday cage disappeared without anyone noticing. On top of that, the alarm systems have been unreliable since funding was reduced and, to judge by the state of the lavatories, the Reggia even has difficulty in buying toilet paper.

Welcome to Vanvitelli’s masterpiece, where one of the attractions is the Teatro della Corte. Yet this stunning theatre has been closed to the public for more than ten years, perhaps because of safety issues or perhaps a lack of staff. No one can say. Welcome to the Reggia. Looking back from the fountain of Diana and Actaeon, you will have seen that the fountain of Venus and Adonis and the twelve waterfalls are moss-covered and rubbish-bestrewn. You will have wondered why no one has bothered to clean the moss off the statues in the secret park of the spectacular English garden. If you want to envision the splendour of the apartments, a splendour that is very much still present, then don’t look down. The floors in the Spring, Summer and Autumn rooms are chipped, despoiled and disfigured by huge red stains. Why is this?

Because despite the crumbling cornices, an average of one thousand five hundred people still visit the Reggia at Caserta every day. Of course, their feet do no good at all to the eighteenth-century floors. Once upon a time, the floors were protected and visitors walked on carpet runners. Then one fine day about ten years ago, a superintendent turned up to order the removal of all the runners. No one has bothered to put them back.